


If they can't lift you then they can't drop you

by heavenisalibrary



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [14]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 06:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1500590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River at her youngest grabs him with claws, kisses him with teeth, and when they fall into bed after a long day of running she’s like a hurricane — directionless and destructive, after nights with his early-days wife, he’s covered in blotches of red and tiny-smug teeth marks, fingernail scratches along his back and bruises around his hips. She makes him into wreckage, when she’s not quite River Song yet, and he shouldn’t like it, but he kind of does, a bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If they can't lift you then they can't drop you

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: river/doctor: the doctor can always tell when river is in her timeline based on how she touches him.
> 
> Prompted by anon, and whoever you are I love this prompt so if you have others please throw them at me at any time. :P

River at her youngest grabs him with claws, kisses him with teeth, and when they fall into bed after a long day of running she’s like a hurricane — directionless and destructive, after nights with his early-days wife, he’s covered in blotches of red and tiny-smug teeth marks, fingernail scratches along his back and bruises around his hips. She makes him into wreckage, when she’s not quite River Song yet, and he shouldn’t like it, but he kind of does, a bit.

When she’s about two-quarters of the way through, he’s still older, and she’s slid completely into her River-skin. She moves and talks and laughs like River, and he can tell from the newly hesitant way she touches him that all the nerves don’t feel quite right yet. She was raw, young, raw and used to feeling a whole lot of nothing, and he understands how that sort of emptiness in the face of the everything that circulated like a current between them could make her angry and frenetic and a tiny bit cruel — he saw the hunger in her when she was young, the bone-deep longing for affection and the total lack of understanding of how to give it and how to receive it, and so he’d accepted and allowed her to ruin him with her nails and teeth and directionless fury. But after the hurricane passes, she’s left in ruins too, and doesn’t quite know how to act.

He’s always the one to kiss her, and her hands rest on his chest — they slip up to tangle in his collar, but she doesn’t pull, and when she gets her hands on his bare skin she runs the pads of her fingers along it. She doesn’t cut in with her nails. Her lips are soft and pliant, and she drinks from him rather than devours him. When he rests a hand at the small of her back as he stands behind her at the console, she pauses before leaning back into him, and there’s always a bit of hesitation before she grabs his hand to run. She’s River, at this age, but she’s missing a crucial bit of understanding: Melody Pond was a danger, River Song at her youngest is scared of the shadow her former self casts, but the Professor in her future will melt the fury of her youth down and build parts of herself from it.

Three-quarters of the way through she’s nearly found her footing, and the edge to her starts to come back. She touches him, little glancing blows that warm his heart, and she touches him often. The small of his back, a hand pressed against his chest, her hips against his, lining herself up, bone to bone. She kisses his neck and his wrists and twines her fingers with his when they run; she teases him, leans in close, wraps herself around him like a vine and then pulls away. She flirts and flits and teases him within an inch of his life, and he slowly realizes it’s because she’s studying him. 

She learns about the spot on the back of his neck that makes his knees buckle, and about the way he moans automatically when she runs her tongue over the roof of his mouth. When they’re out and about, she leans gently against his shoulder, presses his hair from his face — her touches are tender yet calculated, considered. It takes him months in his time to realize that she’s taking notes in her little blue book, not just recording memories. He has to sit through a particularly mortifying presentation she gives on Gallifreyan sexuality. She tells her listeners in that criminally sensual voice in great detail of all of the little things that drive him mad and get him off, citing various writings over the years, which he dutifully looks up afterward. It seems she’s been leaving herself notes as sources over the years, and he blushes for a solid month afterward, only forgiving her when she explains that she was just trying to piss her thesis advisor off.

At the end of her timeline, when she’s older and he’s younger, she touches him like she owns him. That’s what scares him, that first time. She runs a hand over his cheek as though it’s only natural and grabs his hand like she’s done it a million times before, and when he’s too young to understand that she does own him, that she does know him — she’s broken him down in her youth and built him back up through her studies and settled right into his bloodstream once she was through — it’s the most terrifying thing in the world.

(There’s a bit of a grace period somewhere in the middle once she’s gotten her degree and finished her studies and he still knows what they are to one another. That’s the best, he thinks — but it slides through his fingers like grasping a cloud, and before he can help it Darillium comes, and she touches him like she knows him and loves him and more importantly like she loves and knows herself one last time before she’s gone for good.)


End file.
